The Enchanter Completed

"I suppose wine's a natural antiseptic," Catherine said as she watched her husband pour a libation before he drank.

"Not a bad week," Sprague said, wiping his lips, then his eyes. "Enough ta

Catherine grimaced. "Well, cheers!" she said, taking the cup back. She sipped, grimaced again, and drank once more. "You know, I could get used to this," she said and broke off a piece of honeycake so that Emrys, too, could eat.

"Let's have the whole story, young man. Why were you spying on us? For that matter, why are you sitting out here all by yourself and looking as if the hounds of hell are about to be set loose? Sprague, tell him we won't let anyone hurt him!"

"I find myself unable to tell him anything of the sort, unless he cooperates with us," the man said. "Starting with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We're waiting. Let's start with your name, seeing as you've already learned ours."

Emrys hunched his shoulders as he had when he was a boy trying to postpone the moment of his inevitable thrashing for one of the misdeeds that had always come as natural to him as breathing.

Are you a man or a bastard brat? He scolded himself, and straightened before it all came out in a rush. "I'm called Emrys. After my father Aurelius Ambrosius. I told you you wouldn't believe me."

"Son, you'd be amazed at what we might believe. Six impossible things before breakfast," the man said.

Catherine drew a fast, deep breath and glanced out over the plain. "That looks like Stonehenge. But where's the standing stones?"

"In Ireland," said Emrys. "And that's the whole problem. I promised I'd bring them back to Britain and set them up here. In honor of the High King. He's buried there." He pointed with his chin, his hands busy with wine and honeycake.

"The High King Ambrosius," said Catherine, raising a hand to her lips. "Oh my. What're those lines from Keats? 'Like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes, He stared at the Pacific?and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise?Silent on a peak in Darien. ' "

Neither Emrys' teacher Bleys nor any Druid he'd met had ever uttered such words, but Emrys recognized them as a song.

"It was Balboa, not Cortez," the man replied, "but I do understand the 'wild surmise' part, my dear. You think we're 'first looking into Chapman's Mallory'?" he asked.

"Perhaps not Mallory, but definitely Geoffrey of Monmouth, or even Ne

She paused, then gri

"Sprague, don't you know Merlin when you see him?"

Her husband laughed a mighty laugh, then wiped his eyes. Emrys hastened to offer him more wine. " 'There really are more things in heaven and earth… " the man murmured. "Catherine, let's look at the data at hand. In our world and our time, the stone circle we know as Stonehenge predates Dark Age Britain by… a considerable amount. Say two thousand years. And the menhirs and dolmens were transported not from Ireland but from the Prescelly Mountains in Pembrokeshire, while the altar stone probably came from Milford Haven. Possibly the idea was to throw down the cult of the death goddess in Wales…"

"Oh, Sprague… surely you're not going to quote The White Goddess at me?"

Emrys made the Sign.

Sprague snorted. "The words are marvelous, but the whole book's superstitious nonsense."

"Occam's Razor," swore his wife. "Least common denominator. We see a boy who calls himself Emrys. He's vowed to deck his father's grave with the light itself, assuming Mary Stewart will forgive me for stealing that line. If we were in our own world, Stonehenge would already be standing. But it's not, so, I think we've got to assume we haven't just traveled back in time, we've jumped universes."

Maybe Emrys had only thought he understood what the newcomers were talking about. Now, they were talking as if they'd been translated from some other world. Some happier world, no doubt, where boys like him were spared the consequences of their bragging.

The sunlight was slanting down on the henge. Sooner, rather than later, he'd have to go in and face sidelong looks, questions about "well, when do we set off for Ireland?" and whispers, hissing closer and closer until one night, men and knives would come for him, or he'd convulse and die with wolfsbane in his wine or some such.

Such a world probably didn't exist. Emrys shook his head to clear it, then returned to the problem at hand: his boast, his impending failure, and the doom that would surely follow.

"I swore it by the king's grave. You should swear things like that," he muttered.

"No, you shouldn't," said the man. "So it looks very much as if you're honor bound to have to assemble the Giants' Dance here. Can't say I envy you, interesting problem in engineering though it is. But it may be that I can help you. In fact, I'll have to help you if Catherine and I are to have any chance of getting home because I don't believe our meeting is a coincidence at all."

Emrys started to throw himself to the ground in the prostration given to the emperors in the East. "I prayed, and you were?you were sent to help me!"

That the man called Sprague had said that "it"?and surely «it» must be some great power or talisman?rested near his father's grave made him shudder. Emrys told himself that Sprague and Catherine had sat at his table, warmed themselves at his hearth, and couldn't possibly mean to defile it or betray him. And he believed it, he told himself. He believed it.

"Oh dear God, Spraguie, if you don't set him straight, he's going to decide we're gods or demons, and I don't know which one would be worse. Look at the boy. He's shaking like a leaf."

The man's hand was on his shoulder, traveling to his chin, turning his face up. "Boy," he called. "Emrys! I give you my word, we're not gods or demons, but flesh and blood like you. Look!" He drew Emrys' knife and cut his hand. "It bleeds. Would a god bleed? Would a fraud show you blood or try to convince you that he had powers you lacked?"

"It didn't work for the man who would be king in Kafiristan," Catherine muttered, drawing a flashing grin from her husband. One day, Emrys promised himself, he'd have read enough that he'd know the heroes the lady talked about.

"But you knew. I didn't tell you, and you knew," Emrys protested.

"We're students of history. And we know a story… very like your own. Besides, in addition to history, I studied at Caltech?that's a school, lad, where they train engineers like you get in the Legions. I served in the Navy. And I've been to Easter Island where they have standing stones sculptured like giant heads. I've even seen the pyramids in Egypt. Let us help you."

The Giants' Dance was supposed to have come from Africa, and Emrys' guest was an engineer. For the first time, Emrys felt not just the stirrings of hope, but real hope that his guests might help him devise some practical plan.

Emrys looked away from the tall man to the seated woman whose eyes and jewels glowed in the light of late afternoon. A breeze sprang up, drying the cold sweats that had hit Emrys from time to time ever since he'd blurted out his idiot boast.

The lady was watching him. For all their brightness, her eyes were soft and very kind. "I think you've been through some rough times," she said. "It sounds to me as if you found your father after you'd been missing one for a long time. And you loved him very much. And now you're alone again."

"No, I'm not," Emrys said, furiously knuckling away what he told himself was not tears. "They're watching me. Uther's men and the monks. That Gildas. They're always watching me."